The wind has been perfect this week on Tepee and today we had our first sailing race of the summer. The Zests’ colourful sails were a sight to behold but what really impressed was the skill of the campers who were skippering all the boats (a rule in camp races). They manoeuvred the boats with such confidence it was clear they haven’t been just lazing around going for joy rides all month, and it made me think of the reasons why we value skill-building so highly at Arowhon. The pillar of Learning was championed by Jo’s father Eugene, who, with his military training, believed fervently in “character building through discipline” and we have kept it to this day because we see not only how kids who are engaged in learning feel less homesick and have fewer social struggles, but more importantly because of the grit it develops in them. Last year’s keynote speaker at the American Camping Association was Angela Duckworth, who spoke about how talent and intelligence are far less important predictors of life success than “grit” – a character trait she defined as “passion and perseverance for long-term growth” and we believe this wholeheartedly at camp.

One of the first sessions we run during pre-camp staff training is on validation. We teach that a specific, targeted validation is the most powerful behaviour management tool we have with kids, because not only does it encourage more of the desired behaviour in that child, it also shows kids around them what they can do to get positive feedback as well (i.e. if a counsellor tells Suzy how great it was that she made her bed without being asked because that showed real initiative and will help the cabin move up in the clean-up competition, all the kids in the cabin will be motivated to do the same, versus if a counsellor just gives Suzy a high five and tells her she’s great, all the other kids just think “well I’m not Suzy so I’m not great”). We teach that a good validation must label a specific behaviour (praise the action, not the person), and  connect it to a positive outcome.

Then I hop onto the stage and do the splits, which gets an awed cheer from the audience… the perfect segue into my next point: that I am naturally flexible and have always been able to do the splits, so people applauding me for doing that doesn’t really mean that much to me. But, I tell them, if they were to come up to me after the session and tell me I did a good job teaching an engaging and useful session I would be over the moon. Why? Because public speaking doesn’t come naturally to me – it’s something I’ve had to work to master, and something I feel insecure about. So being validated for that means so much more to me than for my flexibility which I already know I have and don’t have to work for (no shame in this fishing trip for compliments;).

We end the session by talking about the importance of failure and validating it – because (as our old friend Seth Godin reminds us), unless we push ourselves past our comfort level, we’ll never grow. So when a kid tries windsurfing in a big wind and needs a tow back to the dock, or climbs half way up a hard wall, or forgets their lines in the play, we applaud them for doing something hard. Because the effort they put in to those “failed” attempts is actually greater than if they had “successfully” completed an easier task.